Trucks of empty bottles flooding Connecticut’s bottle redemption centers may face legal ramifications starting Oct. 1 after a law addressing increases in fraud passed this summer.
The bottle bill was originally passed in 1978 to reduce litter and encourage recycling by adding a 5-cent deposit to disposable bottles sold for drinks which would get refunded if brought back to a redemption center, according to the Container Recycling Institute.
The current issue facing the redemption centers came after Connecticut revised the law in 2024 to raise the value of its bottle return program from 5 to 10 cents. The new policy caused the number of returns in the state to more than double and some beverage distributors to lose millions, according to the Connecticut Mirror.
The law will now make it a class B misdemeanor to return anywhere between 5,000 and 19,999 out-of-state bottles annually in Connecticut. Violations of this level can be charged with as much as six months of jail time and up to $1,000 in potential fines.
Anyone returning even more out-of-state bottles within a year are subject to more extreme charges. The law charges anyone returning between 20,000 and 39,999 fraudulent bottles with a class A misdemeanor, which comes with a maximum of one year in jail and $2,000 in potential fines.
The most one can be charged under this amendment to the bottle bill is a class D felony, which has a maximum punishment of five years in prison and up to $5,000 in fines. This charge would be placed on anyone found to have returned 40,000 fraudulent bottles or more in Connecticut within one year.
The law specified that its intended targets were those committing the fraud and not individual employees who may unknowingly contribute to refunding bottles from out of state.
“Nothing in this section shall be construed to apply to any common or contract carrier or warehouse worker while engaged in lawfully transporting or storing beverage containers,” the law said.
In addition to creating specific charges for those violating the in-state purchase requirement for returning bottles, the new law also limited the handling fees for some of the redemption centers in Connecticut.
Redemption centers in the state are split based on centers who have adopted scanning technology for the barcodes on the bottles and those that still rely on manually sorting returns. Handling fees for the redemption centers manually sorting the bottles would be reduced by 1-cent until the center adopts barcode scanning technology.
Changes to the bottle bill law come after some redemption center owners were skeptical of previous proposals of the law which would’ve required redemption centers to adopt the new scanning technology, according to Connecticut Insider.
Proposals to require the new scanning technology were created amid discussion to create Connecticut-centric codes to deter the fraud. Connecticut Insider reported that bottle manufacturers declined the state’s request.
Fred Miers, owner of Simple Bottle Return in Bridgeport, told Connecticut Insider in February that the only way he expects the fraud across state borders to stop was to either go back to 5-cent deposits or have the surrounding states raise their bottle bill.